1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an optical packet switching apparatus capable of exchanging packets per optical packet by switching an optical switch according to routing information given to an optical packet signal.
2. Description of the Related Art
In optical transmission systems employing wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), a technique that performs the path switching per wavelength by the use of a wavelength selective switch (WSS) and the like is put to practical use. As a technology that may succeed this technique, an optical packet switching method is now being investigated. In this optical packet switching method, an IP packet (10 GEther (10 Gigabit Ethernet (registered trademark) signal and the like), for example, is used as a small unit with which the switching is performed, and each is converted into the form of an optical packet and then the route is switched by an ultrahigh-speed optical packet switching apparatus. There is a possibility that the optical packet switching method can dramatically raise the bandwidth usage efficiency on the transmission path, and therefore it is regarded as a promising future technology. In the conventional practice, optical packet switching apparatuses used in the optical packet switching method disclosed in Reference (1) and Reference (2) in the following Related Art List are known, for instance.